Game for a watch

You can usually tell the age of a gamer simply by asking him what his favourite Game & Watch title was. If his answer is "What's a Game & Watch?", you can be pretty sure he's younger than you.

Retro Pocket gives these gamers a glimpse into this once exciting video game craze, with a collection of eight Game & Watch-style mini-games that do a great job of portraying how the series played.

As you'd expect, however, it's all a bit too simplistic to be much fun.Game & Watch & Learn

Each of Retro Pocket's eight mini-games is styled in the same way - you can see character shadows all over the screen, and objects will "move" through these in a jerking, step-by-step fashion.

The games themselves are hugely varied in terms of how you need to tackle them. Whale Escape, for example, sees you running along the back of a whale, grabbing fish from his mouth, running across again, dumping the fish in your boat, and repeating.

Get hit by the pelicans flocking in, or touch the whale's water shooting out of the top of his blowhole, and you'll lose a life. This idea runs throughout all the games - mistime a move and it's curtains.

Fireman has you balancing between squirting water onto a burning building and catching ladies as they jump out of the windows, while Candy Factory has you catching sweets as they fall off a conveyor belt and dumping them every so often into a basket so as not to overload your backpack.

Each and every game is fairly enjoyable, and they all definitely capture the spirit of Game & Watch.

Bit too retro

But, while it's a well designed collection, it's not a particularly exciting one.

You'll play each game for a maximum of five minutes before feeling like it's time to move on. The speed and intensity rises as you get further, but no new elements are added, meaning you're literally doing the same two or three things over and over and over.

It's a very specialist release. Those who loved the Game & Watch titles may want to return for a nostalgia trip, while people who have never tried Game & Watch before may want to see what it's all about.

But whatever you reason for downloading it, the principle impression it will leave with you is that video games have come a long way.